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Thank you for finally explaining why Powerpoint might have a place in schools. I worked with Powerpoint while working as a management consultant and was originally thinking that teaching kids to think with powerpoint would be like teachings to write by looking by using IM.

deblau writes "In 2006 Thiago Olson joined the extremely sparse ranks of amateurs worldwide who have achieved nuclear fusion with a home apparatus. In other words, he built the business end of a hydrogen bomb in his basement. A bright plasma "star in a jar" demonstrated his success. "The temperature of the plasma is around 200 million degrees," Olson says modestly, "several times hotter than the core of the sun.""

Learning the.NET API is key. For that, I would recommend:
* read CLR via C#, Second Edition, by Richter

I taught myself C# and my first year of code was rather hideous until I started spending time on Design Patterns. The following books are good:
* Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (Hardcover) by Martin Fowler
* Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design A Brain Friendly Guide to OOA&D By Brett McLaughlin, Gary Pollice, David West
* Design Patterns C# (Hardcover) by Steven John Metsker (Author)

You definitely need to do code so I would start some sort of project for someone, like a non-profit, in.NET. Unless you have a preference I would start with web as there are more jobs there. I think.

.NET 3.0 is here and there are new ways you can structure your programs, particularly for a winform application. I would really learn that as well and try to do something interesting there.

Also, C# isn't the only language thats hiring. You might want to consider Java or other alternatives to the windows world. Windows keeps me employed, but if I was to start my own company, the startup costs are too high for a windows environment.

alecclews writes "The BBC is reporting on some German research to allow the exchange of information between road vehicles about travel conditions using peer to peer networking (I assume some sort of mesh). Cars or bikes experiencing problems would pass data that would ripple down the chain of vehicles behind them. 'For example, cars could spot oil on the road by combining temperature readings with wheel traction information. A wheel slipping on the road even though the temperature was not low enough for frost or ice would suggest oil or another slippery substance was present. Once a car detected this sort of danger, information about it would be generated and passed down the line of vehicles approaching the patch of oil.'"

Could somebody confirm the statistic used near the end of the article — "... 85% of the world's Web sites run on Windows while just 2% run on Linux."??? I thought that a large percentage of web-sites today used Apache, surely they all wouldn't be running it on Windows?"

Sharon Heede writes "Following his first groundbreaking book, Biocosm, which argued that the purpose of cosmic evolution is the propagation of baby universes exhibiting the same life-friendly physical qualities as their parent-universe, James Gardner's new book, The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos (New Page Books, February, 2007; $25.99), tells an extraordinary story of the probable future of the universe. Gardner's provocative examination of the most cutting-edge theories about the future of our universe and humanity itself, includes a substantial foreword by artificial intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil, bestselling author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever and The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Gorgeous color photographs and easy-to-read diagrams and illustrations enhance the text.

An anonymous reader writes "This list, built out with the help of Slashdottersandnumerousothers, is much closer now to being a definitive list of the top 150 contributors of all time to the nexus of technologies that first spawned the Internet, and since have helped maintain and expand it. The list was previously discussed on Slashdot in a shorter, earlier version/ Despite the wisdom of crowds, it still doesn't yet include Paul Allen or Seymour Cray, nor Zimmerman (PGP), Tomlinson (@), or Bushnell (Pong)."

URL (2) sends me to the Darwin download page (URL #3). I see a dialog asking me I enter my email to get instructions. It also has a title "Download and Install XFree86 4.4". I enter my E-mail.

Here is where things get confusing. The XDarwin site implies that by downloading and XFree86 4.4, you'll get XDarwin. However, Applesays: "Installing X11 on pre-Panther systems requires manually installing XFree86 and XDarwin.app "

The above page will have you download a simple disk image file (.dmg) and offers simple instructions on how to install it. Once you have Fink installed, installing XDarwin is easy.

XDarwinMac OS X's default graphical user interface (GUI) is called Aqua. However, it is possible to run other GUIs such as Window Maker, GNOME, or KDE. All of these GUIs depend on an implementation of the X Window System, which was originally developed at MIT. XFree86 is an open source implementation of X that we will use.

XDarwin can be thought of as XFree86 with two additional libraries. Thus, to install XDarwin from source you need to download the XFree86 source along with the Xprog.tgz tarball (which provides dynamic libraries that XDarwin needs) and the Xquartz.tgz tarball (which is required if you want to run X and Aqua simultaneously, i.e. rootless).

Instead of installing XDarwin from source (and risking the problems that were discussed above), we will simply install the Fink xfree86-rootless package. To do this we type:

> sudo apt-get install xfree86-rootless

After executing the above command Fink will go and get a copy of an XDarwin binary package and install it on your computer. The apt-get install command should look familiar given the discussion above and xfree86-rootless is simply the name of the package. The sudo command is a way to delegate administrator, or root power to the command that it is is followed by it. Only those in administrator's group can use sudo, which comes from OS X's BSD heritage. Fink should be run with the sudo command since only the administrator should be able to install software. For further information on Fink see the Fink Documentation.

When the package is finished installing, try running XDarwin. In the Mac OS X Finder, double-click on the XDarwin icon, or open a terminal window and type "startx — -quartz". Your screen will be temporarily blanked by XDarwin.

If this is your first time running XDarwin you should be sent back to the Mac OS X desktop. Where you should see that there is a button in the XFree86 window on the desktop, which will be labeled "Show X11". If you click this button, X11 will take over your screen and display things according to your.xinitrc file. We'll cover the details of this file later. To return to the Mac OS X desktop, press command-option-A. To return to X, select the XDarwin icon in the Dock. To quit X Windows click on XDarwin in the Dock and quit as you would any other application.

X might not look like much at first all it provides is the display and management of graphical information. This is because it is not a window manager. A window manager is a separate program that controls the window frames (title bar, close button, etc.) on top of X. We will install the 'Window Maker' window manger next.

Window MakerWindow Maker is a window manager that will run on top of X. It is the window manager of choice to be demonstrated in this document because it is indirectly related to Apple in the following respects:

1. Mac OS X is based on an operating system called NeXTStep.

2. NeXTStep comes from a company called NeXT that Steve Jobs started in 1986 and which Apple bought 1997.

3. Window Maker was originally designed to provide support for GNUstep, which reproduces the look, feel, and API of NeXTStep, which formed the basis for Cocoa.

We will use the Fink windowmaker Package. To install it, simply type:

> sudo apt-get install windowmaker

When apt is done installing the windowmaker package, you should configure your.xinitrc file to run Window Maker. An.xinitrc file is a file that sits in your home directory that is executed when X starts. For more information on.xinitrc see this. Use your favorite text editor so that the following becomes the last line of your.xinitrc:

exec/sw/bin/wmaker

The above line tells X to execute the command wmaker, which starts Window Maker. The/sw/bin/ directory is where Fink will install this command.

Now that we have a window manager installed we can start XDarwin. As mentioned before, go to the Mac OS X Finder, and double-click on the XDarwin icon, or open a terminal window and type "startx — -quartz". Window Maker should then start. For documentation on how to use it, see the Window Maker Website.

If you want to change the look of Window Maker you can go to freshmeat.net and download a collection of Window Maker themes. If Window Maker and X installed you can also make use of some great free software, such as The Gimp and AbiWord. All you have to do is use Fink to apt-get them!"

So according to this Web page, it is best for a newbie like me to download Fink and let Fink install the various packages.

Charlie Demerjian from the Inquirer is quoted as saying '...called Jobs "the lowest form of hypocrite"'. Another telling quote from Torgeir Waterhouse of Forbrukerradet (Norway's consumer council) is that 'FairPlay is an illegal technology whose main purpose is to lock the consumers to the total package provided by Apple by blocking interoperability.'

Based on this article, it appears that the cult of Steve may have to deal with the barbarians at the gate more than than ever."

witten writes "Coderific is new site for software developers where you can actually write reviews of your employers. The scores for the reviews are totaled up, and lists are generated for the best employers and the worst employers. Additionally you can look up employers based on geographical area, so the next time you're moving to a new area you can find out about the best companies to work for. There currently aren't very many entries on certain employers, but some do have enough reviews to give you a good idea of problems to look for."

digitalsanctum writes "Although it may come to a shock to some of you, Microsoft has actually put together a cool web application called Keyword Forecast. Using it you can compare up to four keywords and it will spit out some pretty graphs forecasting the impression count vs. time, keyword age distribution, and keyword gender distribution.
Do you think a tool like this can or will be accurate?"